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Rovers Pave the Way for Hospital Robots

Sunday, 01 January 2012

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NASA Technology

Before Curiosity came the Mars Exploration
Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Before
Spirit and Opportunity came Pathfinder and
Sojourner. Before Pathfinder and Sojourner, the Mars
Global Surveyor, and before the Mars Global Surveyor,
the Viking landers. Over the years, a host of Mars
missions and programs have built on one another,
spurring technology advancements that have led to the
impressive collection of Mars information and images
that we have today.

The development of new technology has made Mars
missions possible. Between and during actual missions
and programs, NASA scientists and engineers also gain
valuable knowledge and experience from research models,
or prototypes, for Mars missions. One such prototype—
Rocky 7—was built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in the mid-1990s as a research test rover for navigation
and sampling technology on Mars.

According to Richard Volpe, a robotics manager at
JPL, the mechanical design of Rocky 7 allowed a system
with fewer actuators, or motors. With fewer actuators
needed for mobility, others could be used for manipulation:
a short sampling manipulator (an arm), and a long
instrument manipulator (a mast). Rocky 7’s arm could
dig and collect small rocks and soil, while the mast had
stereo cameras and the capability to hold an additional
instrument, usually a microscopic imager.

“The primary purpose of the mast was to provide
images of the surrounding terrain from a high vantage
point,” says Volpe. “Using this capability in field tests in
the Mojave Desert with Rocky 7, we demonstrated the
operation style for a long distance rover—paving the way
for Mars Exploration Rover operations later.”

Following the desert field tests in 1996 and 1997,
Rocky 7 was used for algorithm development and testing,
including for autonomous rock grasping.

Technology Transfer

In the mid-1990s, JPL provided funding for the
Vision and Touch Guided Manipulation group at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab to develop object acquisition
capabilities for robotic missions with a mounted
arm—like that on Rocky 7.

MIT utilized two platforms for developing control
capabilities to acquire rock samples: a Whole-Arm
Manipulator (WAM) and a mock-up of Rocky 7. At the
time, Daniel Theobald was a graduate student working
in the AI Lab, where he used the WAM to pick up rocks,
present them to the camera, and then weigh and sort
them into containers. “It was cutting edge work nearly
20 years ago,” he says.

Theobald built the test system simulator for the
mock-up Rocky 7 system and used it to test the arm’s
capabilities. “We were really focused on rock sample
collection and opportunistic science,” he says. “If a
rover notices an interesting object, could we build a
system where the robot is smart enough
to say, ‘Hey, this could be
interesting, and I’m going
by it, so I might as well
grab a little bit of data’?
That’s opportunistic science.”

After developing the
operating system for the
Rocky 7 mock-up, Theobald
wrote his graduate thesis on
the system as well as research
for autonomous robot behavior mediated
by humans from a distance. He
explains, “Rather than move the joystick
and make the robot move forward,
I might verbally dictate to the robot, ‘Go to
these coordinates,’ and the robot figures out
how to control the motors to get to those coordinates. That’s autonomy—having it control the motors
itself rather than have me control them.”

By 1999, MIT alumni founded
Vecna Technologies, of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and Theobald started working
with the company to apply the insights he
gained at the AI Lab. “I thought, if we can successfully
have a robot operate on Mars for an extended
period of time, then we should have robots on Earth,
providing value on a daily basis,” he says. “The robot
autonomy system I developed for the Rocky 7 test
platform acted as a starting point for the autonomy
systems for Vecna’s QC Bot,” he says.

Benefits

According to Theobald, conceptually, the QC Bot
is a Mars rover in a hospital. “Like the Mars rover,
it must be able to operate robustly in a complex,
unstructured environment away from the engineers
who designed and built it,” Theobald says.

To ease logistics in hospitals, QC Bot can be
used for everything from delivering medications
or taking out the trash, to ushering patients
to their appointments. A configurable
touch screen allows hospital staff
and patients to interact with
the robot through intuitive
menus. The touch screen
can be used for completing
bedside registration as well
as capturing vital signs. To
achieve each of these tasks,
the robot can autonomously
call elevators and find its way
through corridors.

Question of the Week

This week's Question: Last week, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, said that the electric car maker would introduce autonomous technology, an autopilot mode, by this summer; the technology will allow drivers to have their vehicles take control...